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Britannia waives the rules. Alone among the 27 members of the European Union, the Brits chose not to join the rush to amend the EU treaty. London decided apparently that surrendering a sizable chunk of its economic sovereignty to a bunch of wastrels and spendthrifts wasn't a great idea.

The refusal met with a rash of criticism and accusations that the British treasured their splendid isolation above the welfare of their neighbors. We suspect there were loftier or at least more pragmatic reasons for the rejection. Who after all has a better nose for sheer bull than John Bull?

To judge by the markets' enthusiastic embrace, the resolution or near-resolution inspired someone up there to grant the world clemency and, for the moment anyway, life on earth as we know it isn't coming to an end. What bothers us about both the supposed solution and the celebratory reaction of global equities is that both were occasioned by a combination of vague promises and what daddy Bush called voodoo economics.

Virtually every reform handed down from the summit seems to be on the come. And given the cumbersome voyage from proposal to implementation, and the history of the parties involved, none strike us as a sure thing. To retain its standing, every member of the EU must vow on the book of Mammon to run a tight fiscal ship and, if it doesn't, supposedly, it will pay the price in automatic sanctions (we'll believe it when we see it) and be denied any financial goodies.

Despite Friday's sharp stock-market rally, our necessarily cursory look by no means provides more than transitory assurance that the summit prescription might be what the doctor ordered for what ails Europe. It's generous with supplying liquidity but otherwise seems rather stingy in furnishing the stuff to get the aching Old World back on its feet financially. However, we'll withhold firmer judgment.

In short, we aren't persuaded that the doctrine laid out by the summiteers is sufficient reason to plunge head-over-heels into the market. If you're seized by a desire to invest, we suggest you pay heed to the advice proffered by savvy Jeremy Grantham in his latest quarterly letter to GMO shareholders.

Among his recommendations: avoid lower-quality stocks; tilt where possible to safety; avoid duration in bonds; and don't be too proud or short-term greedy. He likes resources in the ground, but on a 10-year horizon, because he fears that commodities may be liable to a short-term decline should the weather turn more benign and China's economy continue to slow.

No argument here.

WHILE THE WORLD'S ATTENTION was riveted on Brussels, where a couple of dozen Old World grandees were holding a solemn summit that may determine the fate of the European Union and the course of the global economy, our noble legislators have been busy in Washington, dealing with a subject much dearer to their hearts—their pocketbooks.

More specifically, the House Financial Services Committee, one day after scheduling a vote on a proposal to ban insider trading by members of Congress, peremptorily canceled it. Rep. Spencer Bachus, an Alabama Republican and top dog of the committee, explained that members from both sides of the aisle had claimed they needed more time to consider the issue. Poor chaps, they might have to forgo a lunch or two with a campaign contributor.

The notion that our lawmakers should be exempt from abiding by what is a blanket no-no for the rest of humanity for some reason or another rates as top priority for any number of solons, all of whom have taken an oath to do no harm to their wallets. While we admit to a lack of information as to what lies in store for the ban, we have a hunch that hasty passage no longer seems to rank high among the possibilities. Duck and delay have traditionally been our lawmakers' strongest suit, and doubly so when their self-interest was at stake.

That Congress has elected to stall the ban at a time when prosecutorial ardor for cracking down on insider trading by mere mortals has reached a feverish peak, accompanied by a remarkable skein of successes, demonstrates graphically just how sacred perks and privileges are to the great majority of our legislators and how willing they are to brave the wrath of their constituents to hold on to their exclusive entitlements.

Even those among us who disapprove of Congress ever having granted itself such legal immunity can profit from searching for a silver lining in this disturbing cloud over our vaunted democracy, where everyone is presumed equal before the law, including, we have naively thought, our chosen representatives.

After considerable contemplation, we're happy to report there are positives to allowing congressfolk to ignore restrictions on using inside information to enrich themselves. Just by way of illustration, it provides a second chance for convicted felons like Raj Rajaratnam. He is the former head of Galleon Group, and the infamous hedge-fund operator who grew rich beyond anyone's dreams of avarice and became the poster boy for buying and selling stocks on insider dope. Mr. Rajaratnam has just begun serving a prison sentence of 11 years in punishment of his misdeeds.

Instead of merely twiddling his thumbs, we suggest that he can make profitable use of those 11 years of incarceration to educate himself on how to gain a seat in Congress when he gets out of jail. Once he bought entry into the exclusive legislative club (surely, a smart guy like him has sequestered more than a few million bucks for just such a purchase), he could then be free to resume his former shady practice—but without fear of being tossed into the slammer.

And, just as importantly, Mr. Rajaratnam could set a sterling example for all those fellow securities-law violators behind bars. Once they've dutifully spent their required years at Club Fed, they might well be induced to follow his lead, seeking gainful employment as congressmen, so they could exploit their access to inside information without running the risk of being charged with recidivism and finding themselves back in that other big house.

Come to think of it, while serving their time in expiation of their original sins, they might even pick up any number of clients in adjoining cells. If nothing else, it might prove a big help in relieving the congestion in the nation's prisons and help reduce our swollen budget deficits.

So, in the spirit of the holiday season, maybe Congress deserves some sort of half-hearted congrats for not mending its wicked ways. Maybe.

LAST WEEK WE PENNED a favorable note about the prospects for gold. Relax, please. We have never been nor likely ever will be accused of being a gold bug. But from time to time, either because sentiment sours noticeably on the yellow metal as it has somewhat of late, or some happening out there in the real world endows it with fresh luster, gold seems a decent addition to portfolios, even those of widows and orphans.

Ornery beast that it is, the market rather contemptuously sent gold lower instead of higher in response to our gracious blessing. An incorrigible sore loser, we feel obliged to take another look at gold. And we came to the same conclusion: The precious metal is attractive.

As we explained last week, in a sense it's paying the price of success. One of the relatively few holdings in which investors have a nice, fat profit this year—it's up over 20%–more than a few of them found it irresistibly tempting to take gains in the metal to offset the losses in less-rewarding plays.

Yet, with the outlook for currencies generally glum as debasement continues apace, bullion and gold equities, to dip into clichéd Wall Street lingo, should enjoy a nice tail wind. Mark Hulbert, a crack contrarian who runs the eponymous Hulbert Financial Digest, wrote in Barron's back in early July, when gold fetched around $1,500 an ounce, that there was plenty of juice left in the metal. Sure enough, by late August it had topped $1,900.

Then, the market did a flip-flop (with the emphasis on flop), and by late September gold had fallen to $1,600. Recently, it has been changing hands a tad over $1,700 an ounce, even though, as Mark points out, the number of bulls has shrunk since early July, and the metal is worth $200 more an ounce than it was then.

And that, Mark says, makes contrarians like himself even more bullish than they were in the summer. His conclusion: "Gold is likely to be higher than today in one month's time." And, conceivably, it might rally for longer than that.

We gave Mark a buzz to try and entice him to be a little more precise and, accommodating as ever, he offered that it might even get up around its highs early next year, with the sensible caution that this is a reasonable possibility, not a hard, fast prediction.

AS A POSTSCRIPT TO THE ABOVE, in his latest market dispatch, the venerable technician Ian McAvity makes proper hash of the theory being bruited about by the usual suspect sources that gold is a bubble.

At $1,900 an ounce, he observes, gold was 2.2 times its early 1980 peak. U.S. gross domestic product and federal debt, he goes on, are some 5.5 times their early 1980 levels, while the Standard & Poor's 500 and overall credit-market debt are 11 to 12 times their levels in the early '80s.

Thus, "the real bubble," he contends, has been the "issuance of debt that is increasingly stifling any recovery in the Main Street economy." And there is no sign it won't continue to do so any time soon.

Little wonder, then, that he's convinced we're in the fierce grip of a bear market that could get quite ugly between now and next year's election day, with the already-battered housing and financial sectors pacing the decline.